Recently, there have been significant advances in optical fiber technology for telecommunication systems. One of the proposed methods of exploiting the high potential bandwidth of optical fibers more efficiently, is by wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). With this technique, a large number of communication channels can be transmitted simultaneously over a single fiber. Various systems for implementing WDM have been proposed, including systems based on birefringent materials, surface relief gratings, Mach-Zender interferometry and waveguides. These proposed systems generally suffer from low efficiencies, or from a strict limitation on the number of possible channels.
Another proposed approach is to use a thick reflection hologram. However, the necessity to use a conventional aspheric lens for collimating and/or focusing the light waves makes such systems bully and space consuming. Furthermore, a single holographic element is very sensitive to the signal wavelength, which is usually strongly dependent on temperature.
In many optical systems, scanning of a plane wave over a wide field of view, or linear scanning of a focused beam on a plane, is required. A few examples are angular scanners for Laser-Radar, whereby the transmitted narrow beam is to cover a solid angle much wider than the angular divergence of the beam; aiming systems in which the central aiming point moves as a function of the target range and velocity; linear scanners for laser printers or plotters, and others. In the existing systems, beam steering is performed with conventional optical elements, such as a polygonal mirror or a pair of prisms. These systems suffer from various drawbacks: the scanning unit is relatively large and heavy, limiting the performance of systems in which compactness is a requirment; mass production is quite expensive; the scanning rate is severely limited by the mechanical system; rotating systems usually suffer from wobble which must be restrained in order to allow accurate scanning.
Several proposals have been made to perform beam steering by microlens array translation with either diffractive or refractive lenses. These approaches usually suffer from high aberrations at small f-numbers. In addition, they must rely on fairly complicated and costly equipment, which often limits the performance of the microlens arrays.